


STONE FRUITS

by spicyshimmy



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: Gen, M/M, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-12
Updated: 2011-09-12
Packaged: 2017-10-23 16:20:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/252366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spicyshimmy/pseuds/spicyshimmy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This was written entirely because of and entirely for Naiadestricolor @ tumblr. Connor and Feynriel end up in the Tevinter Circle, and Feynriel navigates all his in-betweens. <i>Feynriel’s master has a face like a stone fruit, skin sallow and soft, but there’s strength enough in his limbs. He beats Feynriel to the tower’s crest, long legs climbing the iron stair with ease.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	STONE FRUITS

Feynriel’s master has a face like a stone fruit, skin sallow and soft, but there’s strength enough in his limbs. He beats Feynriel to the tower’s crest, long legs climbing the iron stair with ease.

Through the spire window facing north, the bowl of Minrathous stretches before them, torchlights glittering bright as the jewels in an archon’s cape; covered wagons speckle the main road, their caravan silks twisting, a river of fabric through the center of the city.

‘Every mind that sleeps tonight is yours,’ his master says, tucking a fall of gray hair behind one sharp ear. His free hand shapes the bowl, the upside-down cup in his staff-worn palm. ‘Already, you hold Minrathous, a line or a shadow—right here.’

Feynriel reaches to blot out the coliseum with his thumb, and the markets under his ring finger. He refuses to turn his hand over, to catch the breezes between his fingers. The wind whispers through his hair, and sends an evening chill into the weave of his fine summer robes.

*

There are no letters from Hawke—now _Champion of Kirkwall_ —but Connor flicks a neatly-folded diamond of parchment onto Feynriel’s table when the archon’s back is turned. The clever projectile lands smack in the middle of _Tome of the Slumbering Elders,_ between a passage on dreamstalking and the dangers of driving a man to madness, using his dire thoughts as little weapons against his brain.

It might as well be called _Tome of the Slumbering Apprentice,_ Feynriel thinks, but there’s no one to share the joke with, only a snort of air hot on his upper lip.

 _HAVE YOU SEEN WHAT THEY’RE SELLING IN THE AGORA?_ Connor writes, with a scribbled drawing at the bottom that reminds Feynriel of a gargoyle’s face, twisted into a not unfriendly sneer. Feynriel’s master has twin brass knockers on his study door that look like pride demons, less friendly than gargoyles, and he laughed the first time Feynriel startled away from the knob, fingers smelling of metal instead of his fine new staff.

But not all ugly faces are meant to scare. The prettier ones seduce, and those are the ones to be afraid of.

When Feynriel’s old enough, he thinks, he won’t choose to ornament his villa with bronze statues that mock the dangers of the Fade.

Feynriel glances over his shoulder, where Connor waits for an answer—no lurking demon, just a bored Fereldan with his chin in his palm—but the archon’s watching again, and Feynriel folds the note under the hem of his sleeve.

*

‘I know all about you,’ Connor says, lingering in the doorway after lessons, and nudges the books clasped in Feynriel’s arms. ‘ _You_ like to make a man wait.’

‘I don’t make _men_ wait,’ Feynriel says, a touch of his master in the bite of his voice, laughter and humor and pale whispers from the Fade. ‘Just boys.’

Connor groans and rolls his eyes. ‘I gave you that one,’ he insists. ‘For _free_.’

*

What they’re selling in the agora is what they’re always selling, but now they’ve got brass-and-tin casts of the Arishok’s head, too, some the size of chestnuts and threaded on leather cords, some large enough to hold a magister’s summoning candle.

The Champion was a mage—Feynriel remembers the split and scatter of arcane fire in his hand—and that’s all the Imperium needs to claim him, the same way Kirkwall will, but not the same way single people do, his friends and his enemies in equal measures across Thedas.

‘Took them long enough,’ Connor says, poking a tray of silverite rings until they jingle. The Arishok’s horns fold to wind around a man’s finger, and Connor loops it onto his thumb, rubbing the metal until it streaks dull with fingerprints. ‘I hear there’s even going to be a play.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ Feynriel says, eyeing a grimacing wall sconce. In the heat from a candle, the shadows under its eyes will deepen, and the shadow it casts will stretch across a full hallway. ‘They’ll get it wrong. They always do.’

No half-freed slave in the theater will ever have Hawke’s quiet charm, will ever achieve the gleam in his eyes when he unshoulders his staff. But there are few things a magister loves more than tales of qunari defeat, and the acting isn’t what they’ll go for—just the story, and what they think it’s supposed to mean.

Connor tugs at the end of a thin braid, tucked over his left ear. It’s a style they don’t wear in the Marches, a style they don’t keep in the Imperium. The rest of his hair is clipped shorter, copper like an old coin, a rich color that makes his face seem paler than it is above the fashionably high collar of his robes.

‘One of these,’ Connor tells the shopkeeper, dangling the ring on the end of his finger. He tosses it to Feynriel, who catches it on instinct, before he knows what he’s doing.

‘This isn’t for me,’ Feynriel says.

It’s not the question he wanted it to be.

‘Well it certainly isn’t for the Champion,’ Connor replies. ‘You can pay me back if anyone up here ever decides they’d like to wear the Archdemon’s head around their neck—you know, someday.’

‘They’ll get it wrong,’ Feynriel says.

‘They always do,’ Connor agrees.

*

The metal heats during fire spells, leaving a raw, pink ring above the knuckle, where the flesh is vulnerable, where all the small pulses meet. A healer could get rid of it easily—Feynriel’s master could cup his fingers between two steady palms, and keep the hurt from ever reappearing—but Feynriel holds to the silverite before he slips into his dreams, and feels it warm in his clutch, grooves written in skin when he wakes the next morning.

*

‘Have you ever…’ Connor begins. ‘I mean…’

Summer heat brings light robes, restless sleep, sticky sheets in the morning. Feynriel’s grateful for his braid to keep his hair off the back of his neck, though his master wears his loose as ever, silvered and paling in the sunlight. He takes afternoon wine with the archons who hate him, who fear him, who won’t cross him even—or especially—when he’s dreaming.

Connor leans over the loose marble railing, half in the shade of the portico, cheeks burned rather than flush from running. The toes of his boots crunch in the sand, heels resting on the tiles.

‘Have I ever what?’ Feynriel asks.

 _Question a question,_ his master says. _You’ll find you curry more answers, that way._

‘I’d spy on everyone, probably,’ Connor explains. ‘It wouldn’t be pretty—but at least it’d be interesting. You should try it sometime. Maybe.’

‘What makes you think I haven’t?’ Feynriel asks, with a touch of his master’s smile.

A magister’s battleground isn’t only in the streets, but the open atria and dimly-lit summer pavilion parties by the shore, staffs and gossip hand in hand, each blink and whisper a subtle weapon. Only the best apprentices survive to become magisters; diverting conversation requires shields the same as diverting fireballs. It’s just as tricky, if less arcane, and fear unspools like pride in the shadow of a _somniari._

Feynriel focuses until pain blooms sharp and acute at the backs of his eyes, categorizing fear the same way libraries are kept in order, alphabetically organized. Connor’s makes him curious, like Hawke’s mabari nosing too near a cavern spider, and Feynriel never learned how to avoid that blunt Fereldan attention.

Connor’s nose is pointy at the end instead of wet; he doesn’t slobber, but he gets a look in his dark eyes sometimes that makes Feynriel want to scratch him behind the ears.

He tucks his hands into his robe pockets instead, thumb running over the Arishok’s sharp horns where they bind his index finger.

‘Creepy,’ Connor says. ‘Remind me never to let _you_ catch me napping.’

*

‘You could do worse than the Guerrin boy,’ Feynriel’s master says from his seat by the hearth, face and shoulders wreathed in smoke from a pair of swinging censers.

The incense sticks in Feynriel’s throat, but he’s learned not to cough, not to blink when his eyes start stinging. The smells are better than the heat for pulling them back from the brink of dreams, from dark waters run murky with promise and age; all uncomfortable things destroy true concentration, and remind a dreamer where the dream ends, where his body suddenly begins.

‘Could I?’ Feynriel asks, as informal as he dares. _Question a question,_ his master says, and there are no exceptions to a _somniari’s_ rules, not even the man who made them.

His master’s eyes are a glint in the haze, a pair of well-polished stones on a long, gray beach. ‘As an ally,’ he says. ‘The boy demonstrates great potential, though he has…troubled dreams.’

It isn’t Connor’s potential that caught Feynriel’s eye, but his hands: thieving letters and folding clever notes, balled into fists or holding glossy green leaves, turning an ornamental ring over and over between his fingers. A crooked thumb tapping a smooth cheek in thought, the beginnings of a beard spotty and silly in the shadow of a stubborn jaw.

‘That he has dreams at all means something, though,’ Fenyriel’s master says, and sucks in a mouthful of dry, sweet smoke.

*

The crowds in the theater are loud and warm, the press of their bodies more substantial than the shades Feynriel knows—better than these feathered shoulders, these gloved hands, each full glass of Agreggio, collars high and stiff, with glittering metal clasps buckled at their throats.

The actors used slim red ribbons for blood in the play, a flutter between graceful hands, but their gilded weapons were no more than wood tipped in steel, vague gestures to perform a dwarven forgemaster’s art.

‘In Ferelden, they use tomatoes for blood,’ Connor says, leaning against a column, boots crossed at the ankle, forefinger looped under the fabric of his collar. When he pulls too hard, he swallows, and makes a face. ‘…You’re wearing your hair out.’

Feynriel feels the flutter at the back of his neck when he tilts his head, not the stiff tug of a tight braid. He’s not sure whether he meant to do it, leaning forward on his bench between reclining magister and kneeling slave, but it’s undone now, slipping through his fingers, snagging in the metal of his ring as he pushes it behind one ear. The sharp cartilage is something he always remembers, the prickly shape neither knife-sharp nor round curve.

‘Let’s steal some Agreggio,’ Connor suggests.

Feynriel tries to agree, but the difference between _ally_ and _friend_ is never clear on this side of the Pillars, sticking like smoke in the back of his throat.

*

They drink outside in the fresh air, neither cool nor still, darkness on darkness with the hum of night-bugs flitting lazily toward the warmth in their bodies. Connor pulls straight from the bottle, dark-blown glass from Antiva with a local brew inside, then wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. He passes the drink by the neck, and Feynriel takes it with a clink of ungraceful silverite.

‘Don’t tell me it wasn’t right or anything,’ Connor says. ‘It was a good story. Bullshit, of course, but sometimes that’s all right.’

Feynriel splutters as the wine sours in his mouth, and Connor laughs, clapping him on the back—right between the shoulders, hard and fast.

‘Just think,’ Connor says, touch lingering along the bony length of Feynriel’s shoulder-blade, ‘if you’d stayed in Kirkwall, you might’ve had your very own cameo.’

‘Starring as the skewered mage, you mean,’ Feynriel mutters. ‘Did you see the size of the Arishok’s spear?’

He can feel the warmth from Connor’s hand leeching through his silk outer-robes, all the way to the simple cotton shift he wears beneath the finery. A languid breeze stirs the air, and Connor’s fingers brush the ends of his hair, pale as deathroot under the yellowing moon.

‘I think I’d rather know you here than onstage anyway,’ Connor says, and he takes the bottle back as a pair of archons toddle past them down the stairs.

Feynriel presses his lips together, letting his hair fall to conceal the curve of his jaw and the glimmer in his eye. The Fade will always be his stage, but he’d rather know Connor here too, in a space behind the curtains, hidden from the audience’s prying gaze.

*

When Feynriel slides beneath the covers, small body in an empty room, he waits too long to close his eyes. And when he thinks he hears Connor’s voice in the Fade, searching him out, he turns it aside, to meet him somewhere else, in the full light of day.

 **END**


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